The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, March 28, 2016

I look at a recent series of high profile incidents--high profile, I must say, because foreign media outlets obsess over PRC media issues--that involve free press and free expression (none of which are characteristic elements of PRC discourse) and power and propaganda (Communist meat and potatoes).

In consolidating Xi Jinping's rule and, I believe, in an exercise in battening down the hatches and making the CCP more disciplined, robust, and responsive to policies of the Center as Xi's plans to reconstitute and redirect the economy enter a much more fraught and difficult stage, control over the media has apparently been tightened.

At the same time, Xi's energetic activities imply that media and propaganda have also become a priority because they constitute a realm in which Xi's opponents have entrenched themselves, and Xi wants to spade them out.

This view is supported by the circumstances of the "Yes Men" essay, widely viewed in the West as a rebuke to Xi's authoritarianism and hostility to free expression but which, on closer examination, looks like something else.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

For a guy who’s sick of the whole South China Sea imbroglio,
I sure write about it a lot.

I have a piece up at The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus: China Not Leaving the “South China Sea”.It updates the PRC strategic move to an
island based posture in anticipation of an unfavorable ruling on the UNCLOS
arbitration.

And a piece at China Matters, America’s
South China Sea Fail, which addresses the shortcomings of the US pushing
the territorial sea/anti Nine Dash Line gambit in the SCS.I regard the US SCS policy as ill-conceived
and ineffective, therefore eliciting a lot of lip service and a lot less
genuine buy in from countries in the region.In this context, I take a look at Kurt Campbell’s patty-cake with David
Ignatius as an effort to logroll an also less-than-enthusiastic President Obama
to escalate a Clinton-legacy/Pentagon-adored SCS policy that otherwise is boldly
going nowhere.

And a piece at Asia Times on what I find to be an
interesting “dog that did bark” (to mangle Sherlock Holmes): the spasm of panic
that the UNCLOS ruling will not come down soon enough to box in the various
candidates in the Philippines presidential election in early May.It’s exclusive at Asia Times, titled Philippine
Election Question Marks Sow Panic in the South China Sea.The specter of the PRC reclaiming the
Scarborough Shoal is being evoked, possibly to stampede the arbitration
commission into issuing a ruling Before It’s Too Late.

Certainly, if the PRC successfully occupies Scarborough
Shoal as a territorial feature beyond the reach of UNCLOS, some people in the
Philippines would question the value and wisdom of the UNCLOS route even more
than they’re doing now.And it would be
a move that would demand a US escalated response, both to display US might and
resolve to the PRC and to persuade the Philippines they have not signed on for
a policy that is not only ill-conceived, but doing immediate and concrete
damage to Philippine interests.

United States strategists never concerned themselves
overmuch with flaws in the South China Sea endgame or possible shortfalls in local
support, in my opinion.Discord with the
PRC of any kind was productive, since it would polarize the region and push
China’s neighbors into closer relations with the United States.And the casual assumption concerning US
influence in Asia is that the military relationships and the pro-American
milsec forces they foster have enough clout to shoulder aside the China doves.

However, as the choices become harder, the options less
palatable, and the flaws in the U.S. approach become more evident, more active
and cruder measures will have to be implemented in order to gut local
opposition to lining up with the United States against the PRC.

I think that overt local China-hawk political campaigning in
tag-team with the Pentagon is becoming a fact of life in the Philippines and
Australia.And I think more extreme
efforts to invoke a sense of regional crisis to force local governments off the
fence and sign on for things like joint FON patrols, open statements against
the PRC in SCS etc. will become the key destabilizing issue in the SCS in the
upcoming period.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Stupid Sh*t: US Failure, Denial, and
Escalation in the South China Sea

By most metrics the US campaign to
deter and modify PRC behavior in the South China Sea has been a colossal bust.

The US “Freedom of Navigation”
initiative for the South China Sea is, to put it bluntly, completely
bogus.The PRC has no interest in
impeding the movement of ships in the South China Sea and the US Navy, when it
goes into the region to engage in its ostensibly confrontational high risk
FONOPs, is simply pushing against Jell-O.The PLAN stays out of the way and lets them sail around.

In early March, the United States
sailed a carrier battle group through the South China Sea and flew 226 sorties.Chinese response: Meh.

The second leg of the US maritime
“lawfare” strategy, the Philippine arbitration gambit—using arbitration under
the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea a.k.a. UNCLOS to repudiate the PRC
“Nine-Dash-Line” claim to maritime sovereignty over the South China Sea--is
probably not going to yield any stunning victories.China has categorically announced it will
ignore the ruling, UNCLOS has no enforcement mechanism and, even if the US
wanted to step up and do the job on UNCLOS’ behalf, it’s not even a signatory
to UNCLOS.Awkward.

And the PRC has funneled billions it
might have spent elsewhere into securing its position as the dominant national
presence across large swaths of the South China Sea through island building,
island development, and expansion of its coast guard fleet.

It should have been realized from
the beginning that the US maritime gambit in the South China Sea—conceived by
Kurt Campbell, indefatigably promoted by Hillary Clinton as the cornerstone of
her “screw the Chinese” excuse me, “smart power in Asia” policy and, for
obvious reasons, passionately adored by the United States Navy—was headed for
failure.

The PRC had never treated the South
China Sea as exclusive territory.Free
military and civilian air and sea traffic through the region was always a PRC
national priority given the relative weakness of its own navy and air
force.For the last thirty years, the
PRC’s precarious island/atoll/outpost claims had coexisted with the precarious
island/atoll/outpost claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan without
military clashes.

Friction was largely confined to
resource exploitation: hydrocarbon reserves and fishing operations, with the
PRC behaving rather d*ckishly either to exploit these opportunities exclusively
or to strongarm its weaker neighbors into cooperation on terms favorable to the
PRC.

When Vietnam and the Philippines
moved to bring their territorial waters/EEZ claims in line with UNCLOS,
theoretically the PRC resource claims were at risk: neighboring countries’ EEZ
claims could chew up most of the South China Sea, leaving the PRC shut out of
potentially lucrative oil, gas, and fishing plays.

Practically, as opposed to
theoretically, is another matter.

The key to the South China Sea has
never been its waters.It’s the islands,
the atolls, the shoals, the Low Tide Elevations (LTEs).I, for one, already saw signs
of the PRC considering migration to a UNCLOS-derived if not compliant island
sovereignty basis for its South China Sea claims a few years back.

The PRC can retreat to its
hodgepodge of island, atoll, and LTE holdings, assert territorial sea and EEZ
claims around them, and put itself in a position in which it could maliciously
complicate the enjoyment of the Philippines and Vietnam of their EEZ privileges
if and when the Nine-Dash-Line was invalidated.

And the US has got nuttin’ for
that.The US doesn’t take positions on
sovereignty of landmasses.It hasn’t
even acknowledged Japanese sovereignty over the Senkakus/Daioyutai Islands, even
as it places them under the aegis of the US-Japan Security Treaty as Japanese
holdings to be protected against Chinese attack.The US advocates for the status quo.All it can do is issue non-binding calls for
moratoriums on island-related stuff--which are largely ignored.

The Chinese realizes this, and have
rooted their position in the South China Sea on digging in on the islands etc.
they already occupy.

Indeed, ever since the SCS issue has
hotted up, PRC official rhetoric has keyed on
“territorial sovereignty” not “maritime sovereignty”.And, on the sidelines of the National
People’s Congress this year, Foreign Minister Wang Yi redrew the line:

The Nansha Islands
are China's integral territory.
Every Chinese has an obligation to defend them. China has not and will not make
any new territorial claims.

…

China was the first country to discover, name, develop and
administer the South China Sea islands.
Our ancestors lived and worked there for generations, so we know and love the
place more than anyone else. And more than anyone else, we want to uphold
peace, stability and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

…

History will prove who is a mere visitor and who is the real
host.

Wang’s asperity in the last line is
perhaps attributable to the fact that, while the US foreign policy commentariat
expends much righteous spittle concerning the vital need for America to drive events in
the South China Sea, it apparently knows and understands little about the
actual issues involved.The most recent
illustration was the empty hubbub over the surface-to-air missiles on Woody
Island, which the US foreign policy/media combine maliciously or ignorantly
conflated into a repudiation of Xi Jinping’s “pledge” not to militarize the
Spratly Islands--500 miles away.

Looks small on a map, folks, but
it’s a big sea.Would cover most of
western Europe.

If anything, the Philippine
arbitration challenge to the Nine-Dash-Line served only to intensify the PRC
island project.Instead of engaging in
endless jaw-jaw with Manila, the PRC went overtly and defiantly unilateral: it
has physically grown its islands, poured resources into their development to
make the territorial claims appear irrevocable, and integrated them into its
national infrastructure without reference to the interests or sensibilities of
the Philippines.

And it has placed itself in a
position to claim, unilaterally, EEZs around those faux islands, as Japan did
with its notorious Okinotoroshima boondoggle, a 200 nautical mile EEZ
encircling two uninhabitable, not long for above water existence eroding rocks
the size of a couple of station wagons—until the Japanese government secured
them with an investment of over half a billion dollars.

If the PRC exacts the ultimate price
tag for the Philippine insistence on pursuing arbitration—by geo-engineering
the Scarborough Shoal that it currently occupies into a permanent PRC
territorial presence (PRC ships currently control maritime access to the
fishing grounds)—the Philippine government may begin to question the wisdom of
poking a finger in the PRC’s eye by going for arbitration (and, I suspect, by acceding to US sabotage
of Philippine bilateral negotiations with the PRC over the shoal in 2012).

It was expected from the beginning
that the PRC would never honor the result of the arbitration commission.Now the implications—including the prospect of
prolonged economic estrangement between the PRC and the Philippines-- are
starting to sink in.

China containment strategists are
perhaps taking another look at the Aegean Sea dispute as a precedent for the
South China Sea.It’s been a frozen
conflict between Turkey and Greece for the last 30 years.Nobody touches the islands; nobody interferes
with navigation; nobody cares.The PRC
would be happy with such an outcome, even if it involves the US Navy sailing
around every few weeks on another FONOP.

Perhaps that is why the
pro-arbitration forces led by Supreme Court Associate Justice and architect of
the Philippine case, Antonio Carpio, are anxiously calling for all candidates for the Philippine presidency to declare their undying
loyalty to the arbitration approach before the elections even happen, for fear
that a new president may decide to ditch insistence that the PRC adhere to the
arbitration outcome in favor of some kind of bilateral workout.

To render assistance, US advocates
of the pivot have overtly stuck their fingers in the Philippine political pie.

Ground zero for the SCS strategy in
Washington is the Center for Strategic and International Studies.I can’t say its staked its reputation on the
success of the South China Sea strategy (if a US geostrategic gambit fails,
it’s inevitably not the fault of the think tank that conceived and promoted
it), but for CSIS it’s spelled $C$ if you get my drift: money and clout.

Confirming the hand-in-glove
relationship between Philippine and US champions of the arbitration process,
CSIS’s Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative echoed Carpio’s declaration by issuing a desperate
(and, given the supposedly apolitical character of UNCLOS proceedings) rather
awkward call for the arbitration panel to hand down its ruling during Aquino’s
presidency so whoever succeeds him after the May elections would have to eat
the cake that had already been baked:

The timing of the decision
by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on the Philippines’ case
against China’s nine-dash-line claims has critical geopolitical implications
for Asia’s security. Specifically, a decision delivered well before the
Philippine presidential election this May would allow the administration of
President Benigno Aquino to respond strategically and with continuity, whatever
the outcome

…

A decision delivered after
May would in effect roll the dice by putting a new leadership team in Manila in
charge of managing the court’s determination.

If
the decision is released and a new administration ignores it to pursue the
bilateral negotiations that China has demanded all along, it decreases the
incentive for other small nations to turn to international law and arbitration.
If the Philippines didn’t get anything out of pursuing its case, why should
Vietnam or Malaysia follow in the future?

Why indeed?

Anxiety in US pivot-land was further
expressed in a David Ignatius op-ed
in the Washington Post.It employed the
classic “that guy over there is responsible for the problems with my strategy”
ploy in faithfully transcribing pivot-pappy Kurt Campbell’s spin on why his
South China Sea had accelerated instead of deterred PRC adventurism and we’re
headed for “a dangerous showdown”:

What makes this dispute so explosive is that it pits an
American president who needs to affirm his credibility as a strong leader
against a risk-taking Chinese president who has shown disregard for U.S.
military power and who faces potent political enemies at home.

“This isn’t Pearl
Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of
August,’ ” says Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for Asia,
referring to the chain of miscalculations that led to World War I. The administration,
he says, is facing “another red line moment where it has to figure out how to
carry through on past warnings.”

“You don’t want the Chinese to lose face,” says Campbell.
“But you want their leadership to understand that if they continue along this
path, they risk spiraling the relationship into a very negative place.”

As can be seen, the “other guy” is
not just Xi Jinping, who refused to bow before the majesty of the pivot er,
excuse me, rebalancing to Asia.It’s
Barack Obama, whose reservations about the utility of FONOPs is a byword in
Washington, and whose skepticism concerning Clinton-derived foreign policy was
memorably characterized
as “who exactly is in the stupid sh*t caucus?Who’s in favor of doing stupid sh*t?”.

Well…

The strategy hasn’t delivered.Do we admit the strategy isn’t
delivering?No, we blame the other guys
and, of course, try to escalate ourselves out of our embarrassment. And we put the onus on the current US
president for being a wimp if he doesn’t go along.And pin our hopes on the incoming president
(Hillary Clinton, it looks like), who is irrevocably committed to pursuing the
confrontational policy (since she is its public face and terminally mistrusted
by the PRC as a result), to keep the ball rolling.

Campbell’s convo with Ignatius
actually looks like an interesting US recapitulation of the Philippine move to
push escalation, encourage China hawks, sideline the skeptics, and lock in the
policy pre-emptively to sidetrack growing doubts that might complicate
transition into a new administration.Great minds think alike, I guess (and lesser minds club together to
connive at mutually beneficial logrolling).

And the possibility that the PRC
will island-build the Scarborough Shoal and occupy it—thereby removing it from
the maritime realm and into the safe haven of an irresolvable territorial
dispute—has apparently given Kurt Campbell the willies.

My favorite line from the Ignatius
piece was:

[T]he White House has an intense interagency planning
process underway to prepare for the looming confrontation. Options include an
aggressive tit-for-tat strategy, in which the United States would help
countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam build artificial islands of their
own in disputed waters.

I would like to think President
Obama turned to Campbell (or whatever pivot-friendly worthy who contributed
this brainwave) and said, “So we should have been building islands all along?Really?Like the Chinese?So what we’ve
been doing for the last five years, the whole maritime strategy with the Navy,
the FONOPs, the UNCLOS?Wait, don’t tell
me.IT WAS STUPID SH*T!”